by Firedroid

Archive for the ‘Preproduction’ Category

Apart from the concept art and stylesheets, we’re been working hard on a prototype. Developing purely theoretical is doable, but it’s much more efficient to have a prototype to check whether your concept is engaging and fun.

So we turned to Flash/AS3/Flixel for development speed and after a few days of programming and super smooth & polished programmer graphics, our prototype was done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5itdOjJaYCQ

As you can see the interface is quite rough and the ships move jerkily, but the core ideas are implemented. After a few iterations the prototype reflected the core gameplay properly and it seemed like a fun and engaging puzzle game in its basic form.

This is the first styleframe that was made for the game. The GUI is not designed yet so all buttons are placeholders.

In the end we came to the conclusion that we need to increase the size of the fans, give them more body and make them more interesting and distinctive. The wind effects are stylish and effective, but can be made more varied.

Also – when we viewed the styleframe on the iPad, we noticed that the colours deviate and appear way more red than on our development screens. This is something we’ll need to take in consideration and test on other iPads.

The sketches above are the very first ideas we had for cities/villages on mountain tops. However, we decided they were bit too serious and realistic for our setting and that the scale was far too small. Our airships need to feel huge and impressive, and the small houses were dwarfing the effect.

Next we came up with this design:

It still needed to be bigger!

The mood that enormous building set wasn’t deemed appropriate, so we discarded them and redesigned the villages to be more practical.

The houses are built on platforms sticking out of the mountains. This has a lot of advantages in 3D since we can literally stick the platform and buildings into the mountain mesh. We don’t have to model villages that are customized to specific mountains.

Here are some sketches for the mountains in our game. It didn’t take long before we came to the conclusion that making a lot of sketches is rather useless. We just needed to try to make the mountains as cheap as possible (polygon wise) in 3D.